Heart-to-Heart Resuscitation (1/4): A Cultural Heart Attack

To be explained much later!

In my sequence on Spirituality, Science and Civilisation I quoted from Kripal’s article in Consciousness Unbound, where he pins down a crucial point about the failings of materialism:[1] ‘The materialist metaphysics of modernity is our intellectual heart attack.’

A timely warning indeed, but I think we’re experiencing more than just an intellectual heart attack – it’s a cultural heart attack invading more than just our powers of reasoning.

I need to revisit some ideas already explored on this blog before trying to dig any deeper.

Hick[2] talks of the materialism of our current ‘consensus reality.’ Naturalism has created the ‘consensus reality’ of our culture. It has become so ingrained that we no longer see it, but see everything else through it.

Given the hidden nature of spiritual reality and our freedom to choose what we believe or seek to teach others to believe, there is also therefore the immense power of social influence at work on what we experience and how we experience it.

Consensus Trance

This is where we come to the fascinating work of Charles Tart in his book Waking Up. I will be quoting from him at some length.

He begins by contending[3] that ‘Consciousness, particularly its perceptual aspects, creates an internal representation of the outside world, such that we have a good quality “map” of the world and our place in it.’ He doesn’t mince words when he describes what he feels is an important correlative of this:[4] ‘Our ordinary consciousness is not “natural,” but an acquired product. This has given us both many useful skills and many insane sources of useless suffering.’

He chooses to introduce a phrase that captures this:

. . . [For the phrase ordinary consciousness] I shall substitute a technical term I introduced some years ago, consensus consciousness, as a reminder of how much everyday consciousness has been shaped by the consensus of belief in our particular culture.

This is obviously closely related to Hick’s idea of ‘consensus reality.’

Tart spells out the price of this:[5] ‘By mistakenly thinking he is really conscious, [a person] blocks the possibility of real consciousness.’

This capacity for what Tart regards as our automated consciousness is not all bad, rather in the same way as Kahneman has explained in his idea of System 1 thinking, but its downside is potentially highly destructive. Tart writes:[6]

The ability to set up some limited part of our sensitivity and intelligence so it automatically performs some fixed task with little or no awareness on our part is one of humanity’s greatest skills – and one of his greatest curses. . . . . . . . Mechanical intelligence can often be useful for utilitarian purposes, but it is dangerous in a changing and complex world. The mechanical, automated stereotypings we know of as racism, sexism, and nationalism, to use just three examples, are enormously costly. Automatised perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and reactions to one situation frequently get associated with the automatized perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and reactions to other situations, so we can be lost for long periods – a lifetime in the most extreme cases – in continuously automated living.

In a way that parallels Bahá’u’lláh’s ‘veils’ of delusion and superstition, Tart sees consensus consciousness as on a disturbing continuum:[7] ‘We can view illusions and hallucinations as extreme points on the continuum of simulation of the world.’

Even as devout a materialist as Anil Seth is on much the same page in his book Being You when it comes to defining our simulation of reality as a controlled hallucination.

Tart continues:[8]

. . . . one of our greatest human abilities, and greatest curses, is our ability to create simulations of the world . . . . These simulations, whether or not they accurately reflect the world, can then trigger emotions. Emotions are a kind of energy, a source of power.

He begins then to unpack the full implications of his metaphor:[9] ‘normal consciousness will be referred to as consensus trance; the hypnotist will be personified as the culture. The “subject,” the person subjected to this process, is you.’

He doesn’t give us much room to wriggle off the hook here. The state of mind he goes onto to describe is not an enviable one:[10]

. . . . consensus trance is expected to be permanent rather than merely an interesting experience that is strictly time-limited. The mental, emotional, and physical habits of a lifetime are laid down while we are especially vulnerable and suggestible as children. Many of these habits are not just learned but conditioned; that is, they have that compulsive quality that conditioning has.

Daniel Pick throws an additional factor into the mix in his book Brainwashed. He talks about[11] a ‘paranoid style’ that exploits ‘a climate of fear.’  As he explains it, ‘[t]he paranoid style tends to invite us to locate the blame for real problems in some occult shadowy force that is already the source of disquiet (or prejudice), rather than enable one to see contemporary history as a matter of thorny social problems, policy choices, open political struggles and competing ideologies.’

Invisible Connections

The elusive complexity of our contemporary reality evades everyone’s understanding and makes the embracing of simplistic solutions, often involving a scapegoat, increasingly tempting. Also, by placing our faith in materialism, or physicalism as it is also termed, we are turning our backs on the possibility that there is a level of reality, far beyond the physical, in which we are all inextricably connected.

Even materialism can recognise that we are part of a vast network of invisible connections as Ziya Tong’s The Reality Bubble and Tom Oliver’s The Self Delusion eloquently illustrate.

For Ziya Tong, the sad truth is:[12]

Our food comes to us from places we do not see; our energy is produced in ways we don’t understand; and our waste disappears without us having to give it a thought. … humans are no longer in touch with the basics of their own system survival.

Tom Oliver is as intensely concerned to counteract our dangerous delusion that we are independent selves:[13]

. . . We have one . . . big myth dispel: that we exist as independent selves at the centre of a subjective universe.

He explains:[14]

We are seamlessly connected to one another and the world around us. Independence is simply an illusion that was once adaptive but now threatens our success as a species.

Surely it would be wiser, in the light of all the evidence pointing in that direction, to discard the misguided conclusions of promissory materialism, which is just as much an act of faith as theism is, embrace the idea that we are more than our limited brains and transcend the blind spots so forcefully flagged up by Tong and Oliver. It might even help us save the planet as well as ourselves and avoid the kind of anguish-ridden bloodshed of war.

Even that is proving hard for too many of us to grasp as some of us desperately try to convince ourselves, within the norms of neo-liberal capitalism, that competitive individualism works and that, as Ayn Rand spat it out, ‘compassion is evil.’ How much harder then must it be for us to even begin to believe in the reality of a mostly invisible realm where, when we hurt someone else, we seriously damage ourselves.

In his book Israelis and Palestinians, Jonathan Glover, in describing what he calls[15] the ‘deep fault lines in the human psychology’, which he feels are ‘central to creating and sustaining’ conflict, describes one as being ‘the willingness to commit with fanatical rigidity to poorly founded (often false) beliefs’ which ‘can turn people with rival claims or different views into enemies, making it hard to agree on compromises for peace.’

He adds another into the mix which ‘is often found in a group whose members share a common identity . . . rooted in a nation, a religion or a shared history.’ The result can be[16] ‘[r]etaliation, vengeance, retribution, backlash, revenge, getting even, teaching them a lesson: the words and phrases vary, but they reflect much the same psychology.’

But until we can begin to accept the truth of interconnectedness, it far too easy for us to operate on the assumption that, to get my own way and obtain my own gains, cheating, robbing and even killing are all right because I’m not affected by my own crimes as long as I win. All this fits well with the short-term narrow-minded thinking of the primate brain that helped us survive and win in the purely material aspect of our reality most of the time in the distant past when we were less connected in material terms. Now, if one major economy sinks in this time of global capitalism we will all be affected and may well go down with them as the financial crisis of 2008 warned us and, if we don’t work out how to tackle it together as one human family, the climate emergency we have created will be the death of many more of us and of other creatures as well.

So, what then might be the answer. Well, if it is a cultural heart attack that we’re facing, what better than heart-to-heart resuscitation?

More on that next time.

The Cudgel Fight (for source of image see link)

References

[1]. Consciousness Unbound – pages 374-76.
[2]. The Fifth Dimension – page 114.
[3]. Waking Up – page 9.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 11.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 25.
[6]. Op. cit. – pages 31-33.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 102.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 59.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 85.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 95.
[11]. Brainwashed – page 266.
[12]. The Reality Bubble – page 172.
[13]. The Self Delusion – page 3.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 4.
[15]. Israelis and Palestinians – page xi.
[16]. Op. cit. – pages xi-xii.

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The Star of Truth (1/2): the light bulb moment

Given that I justified republishing the sequence on Mapping Consciousness by stating that art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, it seemed only right to republish this short sequence which goes some way to explaining why I feel that to be the case.

Today I was planning to begin a sequence about Sylvia Plath as a follow up to my various recent reconsiderations and republished posts on the subject of creativity.

Two things have derailed that plan. One is that progress has been far slower on the Plath posts than I had anticipated. The subject is far more complex than I had initially thought. I’m hoping to be able to get that sequence off the ground the Monday after next instead.

Perhaps more significantly, in terms of setting a more complete context to help convey how important it is to gain a valid perspective on the role of the arts in shaping our experience of reality, in the middle of this month I experienced a crucial light-bulb moment. I’m still struggling to find a way of conveying this clearly. Anyway, here goes with my best attempt so far.

Preparatory Ruminations

For some time I’d been mulling over how best to clarify my priorities as the years are rolling by, and at some unpredictable point in the not-too-distant future I’ll be compelled to vacate the increasingly ramshackle caravan of bones and blood I’ve been travelling in for the last 79 years.

At the turn of the last century, seeking to hold in mind certain key characteristics of desirable collective action within the Bahá’í community, I created an acronym as a mnemonic: C.A.R.E. The initials stood for consultation, action, reflection and experience. As I’ve got older, and my capacity for travel and vigorous social engagement has declined, I’ve come to feel that I can’t sustainably lift my game to that level anymore.

The mnemonic needed revising.

Fairly recently I created a variation that seemed to work better for me now: consultation, altruism, reflection and expression.

I’d changed only two words — one for ‘A’ from ‘action’ to ‘altruism’, and ‘E’ from ‘experience’ to ‘expression,’ but that seemed to make the processes they suggest more manageable. I felt the replacement associations to be more inclusive and empowering, and don’t exclude some aspects of the older ones. Expression is a wider term than ‘action’ and does not exclude writing, one of my favourite habits. It also gets me off the hook of feeling guilty because I am not being enough of a practical activist. Altruism does more work as the letter ‘A’ than action did, and implies both compassion, action and interconnectedness.

The letter ‘C’ for me now probably also is more linked to creativity than consultation but doesn’t exclude it. There’s a lot more baggage attached to that letter for me though as the picture illustrates.

The new associations reinforce the word ‘care’ meaning action, feeling, concern and/or help etc.

Even so, I wasn’t quite sure I’d got the whole package sorted yet.

I was still working on how to operationalise this mnemonic, and struggling to get beyond too vague a sense of what it implied about how I should operate. I couldn’t escape the feeling that it only gave a general sense of how, and possibly what but not why. I was also progressing towards a realisation that staying calm and not getting triggered by frustrating experiences was also important, and that all forms of caring mattered  – none need to be seen as a distraction from my ‘Bahá’í work’ or my other duty-fuelled passion – ‘reading and writing.’ Even taking care over putting out the laundry on the washing line had its place!

The Light Bulb Moment

Then new insights came.

On the back of a fleeting comment I made, in a recent conversation, that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book The Matter with Things, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a meaningful but subordinate domain to science and religion – it is of equal importance. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

Upon what was I basing my sense of McGilchrist’s perspective?

In The Matter with Things he makes statements such as,[1] ‘[t]he Beauty and power of art and of myth . . . enables us, just for a while, to contact aspects of reality that we recognise well, but cannot capture in words.’ He’s not arguing that words are completely useless. We would be lost without them, but ‘[t]he work of art exists precisely to get beyond representation, to presence, even if that presence is itself composed of words, as it is in poetry. . . . The work of art… is semi-transparent, translucent: we see it all right, and yet see through it to something beyond.’

Imagination, for him as for Coleridge in the past[2], (my emphasis) ‘far from deceiving us, is the only means whereby we experience reality: it is the place where individual creative consciousness meets the creative cosmos as a whole.’ It goes even further than that, as he explains in a quote from Geoffrey Bateson:[3] ‘mere purposive rationality, . . . unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life.’

Even though, in our age of mechanistic materialism, we disparage art and imagination as well as religion, we are still ‘never without a mythos of a kind. In the absence of the celebration of the timeless mythoi given us through art and religion, we do not avoid espousing myths of our own making, much impoverished though they must inevitably be: nowadays they are those of the Mindless Machine and the Selfish Gene.’

So where exactly does that take me, and why does it matter so much and gets me so excited?

The realisation of art’s equivalent importance almost immediately created the acronym S.T.A.R. in my mind — a peak experience, in its way, because of the uplift in spirits that it generated; certainly a light-bulb moment at the very least. If I am to provide true C.A.R.E., in the sense I have just explained, I must resolutely follow my S.T.A.R. It’s only taken me 79 years to realise this. In fact, only by taking CARE and following my STAR will I really be able to achieve anything remotely close to my life’s true purpose.

As soon as the insight came I tried to capture it in rapidly scribbled notes. I’ve used these as the basis for this post but I’m still not convinced I’ve done it justice.

Have I really at last reached a proper, deeper understanding of what I should be doing with the rest of my life and how and why I should be doing it — questions that have been bugging me for ages?

This is such a revelation. I can’t quite capture all its many meanings. This not only explains my mysterious and compelling sense of quest, a desperate drive to search for elusive meaning — something that has driven me ever since my wakeup call in the mid-70s at the encounter weekend described elsewhere on this blog. It also gives me a far better sense of where and how I should be focusing my energy and attention.

I think a lot more energy than I was aware of was struggling to bring this crucial insight to the surface of my mind through miles of labyrinthine potholes and passageways in my brain, which might account for why I felt so drained on the run in to the realization, and so energized since.

Next time I’ll have a stab at trying to explain why this all matters so much.

References:

[1]. Page 631.
[2]. Page 767.
[3]. Page 636.

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Science, Spirituality and Civilisation (1/4): Oneness of Religion and Science (a)

All Saints Church, Hereford

In the wake of my sequence on understanding the heart, I got steered onto a somewhat different track. Every month I meet up with a former psychology colleague and close friend for a coffee and deep conversation on topics close to both of our hearts.

The café we repair to is in All Saints church. We grab our drinks and nibbles and go up the curving stairs to a quieter, specially built part of the café, walk past a wooden risqué carving on the ceiling, which would be barely detectable at ground level, to sit, if possible, at the quiet far end on comfortable armchairs at a low table.

On a recent occasion, after I’d risked boring him to bits with my prolonged exploration of the heart theme, he shared with me a printed copy of the epilogue to Consciousness Unbound by Edward Kelly titled The Emerging Vision and Why It Matters, as downloaded from the Paradigm Explorer website, Kelly co-edited the book with Paul Marshall. A key quote, indicating the general direction of travel of this sequence reads:[1]

Our individual and collective human fates in these dangerous and difficult times – indeed, the fate of our precious planet and all of its passengers – may ultimately hinge on a wider recognition and more effective utilisation of the expanded states of being that are potentially available to us but largely ignored or even actively suppressed by our struggling post-modern civilisation with its warring tendencies toward self-aggrandising individualism and fundamentalist tribalism

As I had found the earlier book in what I came to realise is a sequence of three – Irreducible Mind – a compelling and illuminating read (see links for my blog sequence), there was no way I could resist getting hold of a copy as soon as humanly possible.

It took a few days for Waterstones to get hold of a copy for me, but, as soon as they did, I plunged right in. The reading experience, spread over several weeks, was a combination of pleasurable hope and unexpected disappointment, for reasons I am about to explore.

I’ll be going in some depth into three main themes: harmony of religion of science, the perennialism, and dissociation with a slight diversion into precognition. Before I do so, I just need to flag up two important ways in which I resonated to issues that are not the book’s main focus but were welcome side-alleys.

Heart

There is at least one faint echo of the heart theme in Faggin’s article. He describes a crucial wake up experience he had in these terms:[2]

I felt a powerful rush of energy-love emerge from my chest . . .

This feeling was clearly love, but a love so intense and so incredibly fulfilling that it surpassed any possible idea I had about what love is. Even more unbelievable was the fact that I was the source of this love. I perceived it as a broad beam of shimmering white light, alive and beatific, gushing for my heart with incredible strength.

Then suddenly that light exploded and filled the room and then expanded to embrace the entire universe with the same white brilliance. I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the “substance” of which all that exists is made.

Inscape

In words which open with ones almost the same as those used by one of my favourite poets, R. S. Thomas, he adds:[3]

A little of the time, I began to realise that the truly important journey is the inner one…

I realised that I had almost always repressed my true feelings… I had convinced myself that I was strong, when all I did was estrange myself from my own heart by pretending that everything was fine.

. . . the inner world of meaning must also be an irreducible property of all that exists from the very beginning. Meaning and matter must be like the two faces of the same coin.

R. S. Thomas

Thomas has it this way:[4]

The best journey to make

is inward. It is the interior

that calls. Eliot heard it.

Wordsworth turned from the great hills

of the north to the precipice

of his own mind, and let himself

down for the poetry stranded

on the bare ledges.

Mental Health

Mental Health is another topic which the book occasionally addresses with strong resonance for me. Presti is quite scathing about our culture’s standard approach when he discusses the use of medications in mental health:[5]

. . there are compelling reductionist narratives underlying the understanding of these conditions and their associated clinical interventions.

. . . Something shared among all… non-Western medical traditions is that health and illness are viewed in a strong psychophysical manner. Mind is understood to very much influence bodily processes – there is no schism between body and mind.

. . . In the case of psychiatric medications, reliance on neurobiological research to reveal mechanisms of and interventions for mental distress has led to little progress in understanding mechanisms and designing better treatments. Furthermore, it has contributed to a pharmaceutical industry of design and marketing of medications to address mental distress based on poorly supported mechanistic narratives, with little to show for all this beyond billions of dollars in research expenditures (funded largely by taxpayers) and billions of dollars of corporate profits from the sale of pharmaceuticals to treat mental distress.

My hymn-sheet exactly.

Kripal describes a telling example to counteract this reductionist narrative:[6]

Further scholarship eventually challenged the Katzian position… on pure consciousness.

… [Rachel Peterson’s experience ] she tells the story of how her clinical depression was effectively addressed through an encounter with ultimate reality on psilocybin… The psilocybin did not just ease her of her clinical depression; it also cured her of her atheism. After all, she could not deny her own experience, and she had known, directly and immediately, “an abiding force that permeated all existence – something that felt conscious, vast, benevolent, eternal, peaceful, and furiously important.”

Materialistic Heart Attack

Kripal also expresses a related take on humanism:[7]

. . . this . . . materialism has been so destructive of the humanities, mostly by rendering the human literally non-existent, and certainly irrelevant in the technological world of objects and things.

… Most humanists, like most scientists, assume the same metaphysics. They assume some kind of physicalism or materialism.

. . . In the materialist or physicalist metaphysics, the humanities are the practices of something that is not real, studying other things that are not really real. The humanities are nothing studying nothing.

… The materialist metaphysics of modernity is our intellectual heart attack.

This brings me onto my first detailed focus: the need for us to recognise, as the Bahá’í Faith does explicitly, that there is a fundamental harmony between religion.

Even so, after finishing the book I was left feeling that I needed to do Consciousness Unbound justice but that it was also important, given my caveats, not to exaggerate its value, perhaps also because all the contributors are men.

This first section covers one of its most encouraging lines of argument.

Oneness of religion and Science

Hopefully their case compellingly suggests how the current conflict between science and spirituality can be transcended: they avoid the word ‘religion’ for reasons Kelly makes clear:[8]

We believe that the single most important task confronting all of modernity is that of meaningful reconciliation of science and spirituality.

. . . we believe that emerging developments within science itself are leading inexorably toward an enlarged conception of nature, one that can accommodate realities of a spiritual sort while rejecting rationally untenable “overbeliefs” of the sorts routinely targeted by critics of the world’s institutional religions.

This, in his view, requires that[9] ‘[b]oth science and religion . . . must evolve.’ For him this is a tricky path to tread in the book because ‘most of us are scientifically minded adults… sceptical of the currently dominant physicalist worldview but equally wary of uncritical embrace of any of the world’s major faiths with their often conflicting beliefs and decidedly mixed historical records.’ I’ll be dealing with these caveats about religion in more detail in a later post in this sequence

The rewards of succeeding are potentially immense:[10]

This synoptic vision seems to us to harbour tremendous practical implications… in terms of providing humanity, individually and collectively, with an ethos that is fundamentally life affirming and optimistic, profoundly ecumenical in character, and potentially capable of addressing the multitude of societal ills and threats to a planet that can be seen as flowing directly or indirectly from the currently dominant physicalism.

Basically, the properly recognised harmony between these two approaches to reality could lift our civilisation to a far higher level.

So, what does such an approach mean in practice?

There is so much to say on that, it will have to wait until next time.

References

[1]. Consciousness Unbound. – pages 286-87.
[2]. Op. cit. – pages 284-85
[3]. Op. cit. – page 286.
[4]. Groping from Collected Poems – page 328.
[5]. Consciousness Unbound – page 345-47.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 388.
[7]. Op. cit.— pages 374-76.
[8]. Op. cit.— page 2.
[9]. Op. cit.— page 3.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 8.

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Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (6/7): the delusion of materialism

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . .

(William Wordsworth – Sonnet)

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

If I pause to think for a moment, I can easily imagine a massive groan exuding from any audience of mine as soon as the word ‘materialism’ passes from my lips or through my pen.

‘Will he never stop banging on about this?’ I hear them roar.

Well, I hate to say this, but probably never.

Those who have had the patience to read through my sequence about my Parliament of Selves will know that a battle has raged within me between the sub-personalities who favour poetry, meditation and the exploration of consciousness, and the sub-personalities who are committed to what they would regard as real action against our toxic challenges, such as the climate crisis.

As the controlling consciousness, I have a similar passion about how evil materialism is – in fact it maybe the underlying disease of which global heating is just the worst and most terrifying symptom.  Maybe my fight against materialism is a valid kind of activism after all, even though waged almost entirely in words on this blog. Not sure if that idea would satisfy the activists in my Parliament of Selves though.

What I hope to explore here is why a reductionist belief that matter is all there is and spirit or soul is just a distracting myth is profoundly mistaken. I’ll be drawing on Alexander and Newell’s book but also straying into all sorts of other territory.

A Vision of Something Higher

Viv Bartlett, a Bahá’í colleague, in his recent book, Navigating Materialistic Minefields, which was published shortly before his death, asks a profoundly important question:[1] ‘How, we may ask, can humanity progress without a vision of something higher, more enthralling than that which presently exists?’

I’ve asked a similar question, triggered by Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilisation: do we need a transcendent focus? At the end of a long sequence about his book I concluded that, while I accept that the capacity for a high degree of empathy is wired into our brains, I also strongly believe that a higher level again can be reached, with proportionately more leverage in terms of sustained action, if we also can internalise a sense of what the Quakers term ‘That of God’ which is in all of us. Then we will not only have a strong sense of our links to one another but we will also have the confidence to act against apparently overwhelming odds that comes from the knowledge that we human beings are not alone. Bahá’u’lláh says:[2]

Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.

Only when we have such a sense of powerful support and shared humanity does it seem to me that we can reach that tipping point, when most of the world of humanity will be prepared and able to put their weight effectively against the wheel of redemptive change for as long as is needed, and only then will disaster be averted. Pray God that moment will not come too late for us.

I felt that Rifkin had done his best in his impressive book to suggest one possible path towards a secure future – an identification with Gaia, our planet. Those who follow his line of thinking and put it into practice will surely do some good. They could do so much more if they had faith in an effectively benign power higher than the planet we are seeking to save and which needs our urgent help.

Viv’s conclusion, encapsulated in a quotation from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá,[3] nails it:[4] ‘Man must attach himself to an infinite reality, so that his glory, his joy, and his progress maybe infinite.’

What’s Stopping Us?

This is a fairly simple question to answer at its most basic level. Too many of us are buying into the default dogmatic delusion of materialism that is subliminally conveyed by almost every mainstream aspect of our culture, until we are induced into what Charles Tart calls a ‘consensus trance.’

In his book Waking Up,[5] which featured in an earlier sequence, Charles Tart uses the term ‘consensus consciousness’ to describe how our culture and life experiences shape our perceptions of the world. This effect is so strong that he goes onto describe it as a state of mind that is definitely not an enviable one:

. . . . consensus trance is expected to be permanent rather than merely an interesting experience that is strictly time-limited. The mental, emotional, and physical habits of a lifetime are laid down while we are especially vulnerable and suggestible as children. Many of these habits are not just learned but conditioned; that is, they have that compulsive quality that conditioning has.

Bernard Haisch unpacks one of the fundamental tenets of materialism, which is randomness. Haisch contends that:[6]

[R]andomness is the conviction that natural processes follow the laws of chance within their allowed range of behaviour. Given those beliefs there is one and only one way to explain the fine-tuning of the universe. An infinite number of universes must exist, each with unique properties, each randomly different from the other, with ours only seemingly special because in a universe with different properties we would never have originated. Our existence is only possible in this particular universe, hence the tuning is an illusion.

It leads to the multiverse hypothesis, the supposedly only viable way of explaining how life can exist at all when it depends upon such a finely tuned and impossibly improbable set of preconditions.

Most of us in the West have been successfully indoctrinated into accepting whatever our successful and apparently trustworthy doctrine of scientism pronounces as the truth. Haisch doesn’t buy into this myth for one minute:[7]

The evidence for the existence of an infinite conscious intelligence is abundant in the accounts of mystics and the meditative, prayerful, and sometimes spontaneous exceptional experiences of human beings throughout history. The evidence for random universes is precisely zero. Most scientists will reject the former type of evidence as merely subjective, but that simply reduces the contest of views to a draw: zero on both sides.

The odds are so daunting Paul Davies, in The Goldilock’s Enigma, almost threw up his hands in despair:[8]

So, how come existence? . . . all the approaches seem . . . hopelessly inadequate: a unique universe which just happens to permit life by a fluke; a stupendous number of alternative . . . universes . . .; a pre-existing God . . .; or a self-creating . . . universe with observers. . . Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limitations of the human intellect.

Others are more dogmatic, so dogmatic in fact they refuse to accept the possibility of evidence to the contrary because they are so convinced that no evidence can possibly exist to support what they believe is impossible.

Viv Bartlett quotes Haisch:[9]

A conversation between philosopher Neal Grossman and an academic colleague underlines this point. Bernard Haisch, in his book The God Theory, writes about this conversation:

‘. . . The academic cavalierly dismisses accurately reported details of near death experiences that could only have been perceived from vantage points outside the body as coincidences and lucky guesses. An exasperated Grossman finally asks: ‘what will it take, short of having a near death experience yourself, to convince you that they are real?’ Rising to the occasion… the academic response: ‘if I had a near death experience myself, I would conclude that I was hallucinating, rather than believe my mind can exist independent my brain.’ Then, to dispose of the annoying evidence once and for all, the champion of enquiry confidently states that the concept of mind existing independent of matter has been shown to be a false theory, and there can be no evidence for something that is false. Grossman observes: ‘This was a momentous experience for me, because here was an educated, intelligent man telling me that he will not give up materialism, no matter what.’

The result is that information is buried that might shake our belief in materialism. Mishlove brings in a professor to explain it:[10]

Jeffrey Krippal, professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University, suggests that near-death experiences and after-death communications are much more common than we typically realise. Social pressure is still suppressing the data. Public discussion of post-mortem survival is relatively rare. The reason is that we are afraid of our own supernature . . .

Scientism has even invented what seems to be a plausible copout. Alexander explains the premise they use as the foundation stone upon which to build their castle in the air:[11]

One such metaphysical assumption (referred to as metaphysical because it is at the foundation of our thinking) is that only the physical world exists, a position known in science as materialism (also called physicalism).

And quotes a so-called scientist to flag up the supposedly unassailable defence:[12]

Novella seemed satisfied merely to declare that one day actual evidence would be found to support their assumptions (known as “promissory materialism”).

(And incidentally too many scientists are too afraid to jeopardise their careers to stand up and be counted.)

What effectively proves that this position is fundamentally at odds with true science is its failure to operate on the core requirement of scientific investigation, as Alexander and Newell explain:[13]

I have come to see that true open-minded scepticism is one of the most powerful commodities in this enterprise. However, most of those in our culture who proudly claim to be sceptics are actually just the opposite — . . . Their mindset is the antithesis of what many hold to be the ideal of scientific thinking – approaching such deep questions with the most open mind possible, untainted by premature conclusions.

Experience around the world is littered with evidence that calls the reductionist position into question, what Alexander and Newell call ‘black swans’:[14]

NDE reports by the tens of thousands – and similarly numerous reports of deathbed visions, after-death communications, shared-death experiences, and past-life memories of children indicative of reincarnation – represent data that demand explanation if one has any interest in understanding the world as it is, and not just as they think it should be.

Experience requires dispassionate exploration if we are ever to understand what it really means. That the spiritual dimension is invisible does not warrant our contemptuous dismissal of its possible existence, but here we find scientism’s double standard hiding in plain sight:[15]

[Black swan data are dismissed but . . .] the existence of [invisible] neutrinos is not in doubt to most physicists, neutrinos being a very subtle form of matter, yet their existence is crucial to evolving models of subatomic physics. The fact that they are not as obvious as Canada does not mean they do not exist.

Applying such a double standard makes it next to impossible for [NDE] research studies ever to demonstrate significance.

Limitations of Methodology

Another key obstacle to gaining wider acceptance of anomalous experiences in scientific circles is the challenges of replicating them in laboratory conditions.

I have already touched on this in my review of Bruce Greyson’s book After.

Attempts to provide an even more rigorous methodology may have failed, not because the NDEs were inauthentic but because the methods adopted were inappropriate to the task. A good example is the idea of placing targets close to the ceiling in the hope that experiencers would spot them. Consultations with a group of NDE experiencers flagged up the problem with this approach very clearly and, in my view, convincingly. Greyson described what happened:[16]

When I discussed [my] research findings at a conference attended by a large number of people who had had NDES, they were astounded at what they considered my naivete in carrying out this study. Why, they argued, would patients whose hearts had just stopped and who were being resuscitated – patients who were stunned by their unexpected separation from their bodies – go looking around the hospital room for a hidden image that has no relevance to them, but that some researcher had designated as the “target”?

This also resonates with what Julie Beischel writes in Leslie Kean’s Surviving Death about mediumship studies:[17]

The analogy I like to use is that a mediumship study in which the environment is not optimised for mediumship to happen is akin to placing a seed on a tabletop and then claiming the seed is a fraud when it doesn’t sprout.

Alexander and Newell are on essentially the same page:[18] ‘The elaborate process of setting up a scientific assessment of prayer in a controlled setting often strips much of the spiritual energy out of the endeavour.’

‘Doubt Wisely’

What all too often makes materialism, and its sibling, scientism, delusional is the toxic degree of certainty some of us invest in it, something which leads us to dismiss a priori any evidence that contradicts what we have decided to conclude is absolutely true, regardless of the possible strength of that evidence.

Perhaps it is also important to clarify that making this argument does not necessarily mean that I am trying to meet reductionist dogmatism with spiritual fundamentalism. The arguments and evidence I have marshalled here and elsewhere do not prove there are ghosts or gods. It simply convincingly demonstrates that there is something more than matter that needs to be included in our paradigm.

I have, of course, chosen to go further than that, but am happy to admit that this is a personal act of faith, something which dogmatic materialists seems extremely reluctant to admit in their turn: they too have made a leap of faith. To me the choice I’ve made seems both more fulfilling and more realistic than placing my faith in matter.

Significantly, though I have decided to believe in a God, a spiritual dimension and an after life, and also to trust what Bahá’u’lláh tells me, I know that I cannot trust my understanding of any of these things. I know the first three of these exist but even with Bahá’u’lláh’s help I have no certainty about the nature of God, only a vague idea of what the spiritual dimension might be, and harbour slightly stronger impressions of what the afterlife might be like, derived largely from survivors’ descriptions of near-death-experiences (NDEs), which one experiencer described as being like ‘trying to paint a smell.’ I try to follow John Donne’s advice in Satire III and ‘doubt wisely’ – I only wish the followers of dogmatically materialistic scientism would do the same.

The cost of materialism

The delusional state I have attempted to subvert is not just a harmless choice of perspective.

It paves the way for and even fosters destructive cultural consequences such as our blind faith in neoliberal capitalism, the glorification of individualism, and Ayn Rand’s vilification of altruism, to name but a few.

I think I’ll leave the final words of this post to more eloquent sources. In Century of Light, in which the Universal House of Justice encapsulates its perspective on the world during the previous century, we find:[19]

Tragically, what Bahá’ís see in present-day society is unbridled exploitation of the masses of humanity by greed that excuses itself as the operation of  “impersonal market forces”. What meets their eyes everywhere is the destruction of moral foundations vital to humanity’s future, through gross self-indulgence masquerading as “freedom of speech”. What they find themselves struggling against daily is the pressure of a dogmatic materialism, claiming to be the voice of “science”, that seeks systematically to exclude from intellectual life all impulses arising from the spiritual level of human consciousness.

Materialism is a kind of religion, in their view:[20]

Fathered by nineteenth century European thought, acquiring enormous influence through the achievements of American capitalist culture, and endowed by Marxism with the counterfeit credibility peculiar to that system, materialism emerged full-blown in the second half of the twentieth century as a kind of universal religion claiming absolute authority in both the personal and social life of humankind. Its creed was simplicity itself. Reality—including human reality and the process by which it evolves—is essentially material in nature. The goal of human life is, or ought to be, the satisfaction of material needs and wants. Society exists to facilitate this quest, and the collective concern of humankind should be an ongoing refinement of the system, aimed at rendering it ever more efficient in carrying out its assigned task.

Time to stop now.

Living in a Mindful Universe also deals with many other important topics including the meaning of suffering, health, the importance of nature and reincarnation. More on some of that next time.

References

[1]. Navigating Materialistic Minefields – page 160.

[2]. The Hidden Words – Arabic no. 13.

[3]. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on Divine Philosophy – pages 136-37.

[4]. Navigating Materialistic Minefields — page 147.

[5]. Waking Up – page 95.

[6]. The God Theory – iBooks page 16.

[7]. Op cit. – pages 18-19.

[8]. The Goldilocks Enigma – pages 292-93.

[9]. Navigating Materialistic Minefields – pages 114-15.

[10]. Beyond the Brain – page 95.

[11]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 121.

[12]. Op. cit – page 121.

[13]. Op. cit. – pages 132 -33.

[14]. Op. cit. – page 136.

[15]. Op. cit. – page 139.

[16]. After – page 74.

[17]. Surviving Death – page 172.

[18]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 262.

[19]. Century of Light – page 136.

[20]. Century of Light – pages 89-90.

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Invisible Influences & Unintended Consequences (5/6): Biosphere Consciousness, Empathy & Altruism

The world’s population currently consumes the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year, according to analysis by the Global Footprint Network. Photograph: NASA (For source see link)

Were one to observe with an eye that discovereth the realities of all things, it would become clear that the greatest relationship that bindeth the world of being together lieth in the range of created things themselves, and that co-operation, mutual aid and reciprocity are essential characteristics in the unified body of the world of being, inasmuch as all created things are closely related together and each is influenced by the other or deriveth benefit therefrom, either directly or indirectly.

(Abdu’l-Bahá, from a previously untranslated Tablet quoted in part in a statement from the Bahá’í International Community Conservation and Sustainable Development in the Baha’i Faith)

Post-truth politics also poses a problem for scepticism. A healthy democracy needs to leave plenty of room for doubt. There are lots of good reasons to be doubtful about what the reality of climate change will entail: though there is scientific agreement about the fact of global warming and its source in human activity, the ultimate risks are very uncertain and so are the long-term consequences. There is plenty of scope for disagreement about the most effective next steps. The existence of a very strong scientific consensus does not mean there should be a consensus about the correct political response. But the fact of the scientific consensus has produced an equal and opposite reaction that squeezes the room for reasonable doubt. The certainty among the scientists has engendered the most intolerant kind of scepticism among the doubters.

(From How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous by David Runciman – Guardian Friday 7 July 2017)

Given the current sequence focusing on Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight, her exploration of how she was jolted by a brain bleed into an altogether different experience of reality, made me feel it was worth republishing this long sequence from 2017. 

At the end of the last post I shared the hope that my helicopter survey of a vast field has done enough to convey clearly my sense that as individuals and communities we are locked into unconsciously determined and potentially destructive patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour, until we discover the keys of reflection for individuals and consultation for groups.

What we might do next is the focus of the final two posts.

When people resist therapy the personal price can be high. When cultures resist change the social and environmental costs can be even greater.

At whatever level we consider the matter, counteracting our default patterns requires significant effort, and the more complicated the problem, as in the case of climate change, the greater the effort. Even a simple puzzle can defeat even the best brains if the necessary effort is not taken to solve it. And often no effort is made because no failure in problem-solving is detected. Take this beautiful illustration of the point from Daniel Khaneman’s excellent treatment of what he calls System 1 (rapid fire reaction) and System 2 (careful effortful thinking) in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.I have dealt at length elsewhere with my distaste for the use of the word ‘intuitive’ in this context: I prefer ‘instinctive.’ Now though is not the time to delve into that problem: I’m currently republishing some of the posts dealing with that question.

The main point and its relevance is hopefully clear.

Biosphere Consciousness

Taking on the difficult problems is clearly going to be a challenge when we don’t even recognise or admit that our default reponses are so wide of the mark.

We need to reach at least a basic level of interactive understanding on a global scale if we are to successfully address the problems of our age. But we need more than that.

Rifkin, in his excellent book The Empathic Civilisation argues the case eloquently. He recognizes that to motivate us to make the necessary sacrifices to allow our civilization to survive its entropic processes we need something larger than ourselves to hold onto. By entropic he means all the waste and excessive consumption a growing population generates.

He doesn’t think religion will do the trick though.

For example, he sees the Golden Rule, a central tenant of all the great world religions, as self-interested because, by observing it, according to his version of religion, we buy paradise when we die. Kant, in his view, almost rescued it but not quite (page 175):

Immanuel Kant make the rational case for the Golden Rule in the modern age in his famous categorical imperative. . . . . First, “Act only on that maxim that can at the same time be willed to become a universal law.” Second, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” Although Kant eliminated the self-interested aspect of doing good that was so much a part of most religious experiences, he also eliminated the “felt” experience that makes compassion so powerful and compelling.

Rifkin does acknowledge that Judaism endorses the universal application of the Golden Rule (page 214):

Lest some infer that the Golden Rule applies literally to only one’s neighbours and blood kin, the Bible makes clear that it is to be regarded as a universal law. In Leviticus it is written: “[T]he stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve (1808), version from the “Butts set” (for source of image see link)

He acknowledges that the Axial Age (page 216) was ‘the first budding of empathic consciousness.’ He feels Christianity has warped this ideal, especially in respect of the existence of Satan, the Fall of man, and the resultant denigration of the body. He is aware that other religious teachings do not fall into what would be for him the same trap. However, he dates from the time of the Enlightenment the demise of religion as an effective force in society.

He feels that he can now locate our redemption in that same physical nature he is convinced that religion is revolted by (page 349):

After deconstructing Kant’s categorical imperative, Schopenhauer offers a detailed description of moral behaviour that he argues is embedded in the very sinew of human nature – with the qualification that it needs to be brought out and nurtured by society if it is to be fully realised. He argues that “compassion” is at the core of human nature.

The question is whether we agree that the way evolution has shaped the brain is also a sufficient condition to produce the necessary levels of self-mastery and altruism and spread them widely and deeply enough across humanity to preserve us in the longer term.

He clearly hopes it does. He describes the exact nature of the challenge our situation creates (page 593):

The challenge before us is how to bring forward all of these historical stages of consciousness that still exist across the human spectrum to a new level of biosphere consciousness in time to break the lock that shackles increasing empathy to increasing entropy. . . .

And he concludes (ibid.):

In a world characterised by increasing individuation and made up of human beings at different stages of consciousness, the biosphere itself maybe the only context encompassing enough to unite the human race as a species.

This position is perhaps an inevitable consequence of his unwillingness to admit the possibility of a theological inspiration. I am astonished even more by a subsequent claim, which is imbued with the same blinkering assumption that Western materialist models of the world have basically got it right. He blurts out, in surprise (page 593-4):

While the new distributed communications technologies – and, soon, distributed renewable energies – are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. . . .

Does he have no awareness of current trends in holistic thinking, which assert that we are already and have always been interconnected at the deepest possible levels, not simply in terms of these recently emerged material factors? Is he ignoring long-standing spiritual systems such as that of the Native Americans whose foundation stone is this concept of interconnectedness? Does he not know of the empirical evidence being generated by near-death experiences, many of which include reports of just such a sense of nonmaterial interconnectedness? Has he not heard even a whisper of the Bahá’í position, admittedly recently emerged but with a longer history than the roots of holism in physics, that humanity is one and needs to recognise its essential unity if we are to be able to act together to solve the global problems that confront us? The problem is not that no one is offering a reason ‘why we ought to be connected’: the problem is that too few people are accepting the idea, expressed by millions of our fellow human beings in many complementary models of the world, that we are already deeply connected at a spiritual level, not just with each other but with the earth that sustains our material existence.

Naomi Klein makes a powerful case for hoping that the shock of climate change will have just the kind of positive effect that Rifkin looks for in Gaia, though she also is fully aware that shock often narrows our capacity to think, feel and relate and we end up in the tunnel-vision of fight and flight. She is aligned with Rifkin in his hope that identification on our part with the plight of the planet will be a sufficient catalyst to produce the desired shift.

Altruism

Matthieu Ricard takes on these issues from a different angle.

There are major obstacles to addressing our challenges effectively and Ricard is not blind to them (page 580):

. . . . . in a world where politicians aim only to be elected or re-elected, where financial interest groups wield a disproportionate influence on policy makers, where the well-being of future generations is often ignored since their representatives do not have a seat at the negotiating table, where governments pursue national economic policies that are to the detriment of the global interest, decision-makers have barely any inclination to create institutions whose goal would be to encourage citizens to contribute to collective wealth, which would serve to eradicate poverty.

Snower contends, and Ricard agrees with him and so do I, that reason alone will never get us beyond this point (page 581):

. . . . no one has been able to show that reason alone, without the help of some prosocial motivation, is enough to persuade individuals to widen their sphere of responsibility to include all those who are affected by their actions.

Because he is a Buddhist, in his book Ricard chooses to advocate altruism (ibid):

Combined with the voice of reason, the voice of care can fundamentally change our will to contribute to collective goods. Such ideas echo the Buddhist teachings on uniting wisdom and compassion: without wisdom, compassion can be blind without compassion, wisdom becomes sterile.

Ricard (page 611) raises the issue of ‘altruism for the sake of future generations.’ If we accept the reality of climate change, as most of us now do, our behaviour will unarguably affect our descendants for the worse if we do not change it. Given that evolution has produced a human brain that privileges short term costs and benefits over long-term ones, such that a smoker does not even empathise with his future self sufficiently strongly to overcome in many cases the powerful allure of nicotine addiction, what chance has altruism in itself got of producing the desired effect?

Ricard to his credit faces this head on and quotes the research of Kurzban and Houser (page 631-32). They conclude from their research that:

20% of people are altruists who bear the fortunes of future generations in mind and are disposed to altering their ways of consumption to avoid destroying the environment. . . . . .

[However], around 60% of people follow prevailing trends and opinion leaders, something that highlights the power of the herd instinct in humans. These ‘followers’ are also ‘conditional cooperators:’ they are ready to contribute to the public good on the condition that everyone else does likewise.

The final 20% are not at all inclined to cooperate and want more than anything to take advantage of all the opportunities available to them. They are not opposed to other people’s happiness in principle, but it is not their business.

Shades of Pettigrew again! This clearly indicates that reaching the tipping point, where most people have widened out their unempathic tunnel vision to embrace the whole of humanity and future generations in a wide-angled embrace, is some way off still. He goes on to outline the many practical steps that lie within our reach, such as recycling more of our waste metals and moving to hydrogen powered cars. Enough of us have to want to bring those steps into reality before change will occur at a fast enough rate.

According to Ricard, we must move (page 682) from ‘community engagement to global responsibility.’ To do this it is necessary ‘to realise that all things are interdependent, and to assimilate that world view in such a way that it influences our every action.’ He sees altruism as the key to this transition.

The last post will take a closer look at that amongst other possibilities.

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Trauma, Psychosis and Transcendence (3/5): The Everest of Instinctive Incredulity

Because the next posts in the sequence about The Waste Land will be looking in some detail at issues relating to madness and modernism, it seemed appropriate to republish this sequence yet again.

In the previous post I ended up exploring James Davies’ perspective in his recent book Cracked. I was focusing upon his emphasis on relationships rather then medication as the more effective way to help those with psychotic experiences.

Pseudo-Science

It’s where he goes next that I found most unexpected but most welcome to my heart. He leads into it with an interview with Thomas Sasz just before his death at the age of 92 (page 276). He asks Szasz, ‘why do we believe as a culture that suffering must be removed chemically rather than understood in many cases as a natural human phenomenon, and possibly something from which we can learn and grow if worked through productively?’

Szasz’s response is fascinating:

Our age has replaced a religious point of view with a pseudo-scientific point of view. . .   Now everything is explained in terms of molecules and atoms and brain scans. It is a reduction of the human being to a biological machine. We don’t have existential or religious or mental suffering any more. Instead we have brain disorders.

This resonates strongly with the Bahá’í position as expressed, for instance, in Century of Light (page 136):

What [Bahá’ís]  find themselves struggling against daily is the pressure of a dogmatic materialism, claiming to be the voice of “science“, that seeks systematically to exclude from intellectual life all impulses arising from the spiritual level of human consciousness.

Davies summarises Szasz’s position on psychiatry (page 277): ‘It had become deluded in its belief that its physical technologies, its ECT machines and laboratory-manufactured molecules, could solve the deeper dilemmas of the soul, society and self.’

He quotes Bracken’s view on how this brings in capitalism (page 278):

What complicates things more is that we also live in a capitalist society, where there is always going to be someone trying to sell you something… In fact, some people would argue that capitalism can only continue by constantly making us dissatisfied with our lives.… You know, if everybody said I am very happy with my television, my car and everything else I’ve got, and I’m perfectly content with my lifestyle, the whole economy would come shattering down around our ears.

He continues (page 279):

What we customarily call mental illness is not always illness in the medical sense. It’s often a natural outcome of struggling to make our way in a world where the traditional guides, props and understandings are rapidly disappearing… Not all mental strife is therefore due to an internal malfunction but often to the outcome of living in a malfunctioning world. The solution is not yet more medicalisation, but an overhaul of our cultural beliefs, a reinfusing of life with spiritual, religious or humanistic meaning with emphasis on the essential involvement of community, and with whatever helps bring us greater direction, understanding, courage and purpose.

Instinctive Incredulity

However, we are even further away from generally accepting that some experiences labelled psychotic may have spiritual dimensions.

Christina and Stefan Grof’s indictment of our civilisation in their book The Stormy Search for the Self: understanding and living with spiritual emergency sings from essentially the same hymn sheet as Davies (page 235):

Though the problems in the world have many different forms, they are nothing but symptoms of one underlying condition: the emotional, moral, and spiritual state of modern humanity. In the last analysis, they are the collective result of the present level of consciousness of individual human beings. The only effective and lasting solution to these problems would, therefore, be a radical inner transformation of humanity on a large scale and its consequent rise to a higher level of awareness and maturity.

David Fontana also writes from direct experience of this painful level of materialism and its default stance of resolute incredulity when faced with any evidence, no matter how compelling, in favour of a spiritual dimension to reality. He had to combat it at almost every turn of his investigations. He even bravely admits to being contaminated by it himself. In the in-depth survey of his book Is there an afterlife? he writes (page 335):

My difficulty in writing about Scole [a long and detailed exploration of psychic phenomena including material effects] is not because the experiences we had with a group have faded. They are as clear as if they happened only weeks ago. The difficulty is to make them sound believable. It is a strange fact of life that whereas most psychical researchers interested in fieldwork are able to accept – or at least greet with open minds – the events of many years ago connected with the mediumship of physical mediums such as Home, Palladino, and Florence Cook, a strain of scepticism fostered by scientific training makes it much harder for them to accept that similar events may happen today, and may even be witnessed by those of us fortunate enough to be there when they occur. I mentioned in my discussion of the Cardiff poltergeist case… the struggle I had with my own belief system after seeing the phenomena concerned. When in the room while they were taking place I had no doubt they were genuine, but as soon as I began to drive home I started to doubt. . . . . The whole thing seemed simply unbelievable.

He adds:

It took a lengthy investigation, including one occasion when I witnessed phenomena while I was on my own in one of the rooms where the disturbances took place and the owners were two hundred miles away on holiday, before I could fully accept that poltergeist phenomena can indeed be genuine, and provide evidence not only of paranormality but, at least in some cases, of survival.

The Grofs articulate the challenge exactly (page 236)

The task of creating an entirely different set of values and tendencies for humanity might appear to be too unrealistic and utopian to offer any hope. What would it take to transform contemporary mankind into a species of individuals capable of peaceful coexistence with their fellow men and women regardless of colour, language, or political conviction – much less with other species?

They list our current characteristics in detail including violence, greed, habitual dissatisfaction and a severe lack of awareness that we are connected with nature. They conclude, ‘In the last analysis, all these characteristics seem to be symptomatic of severe alienation from inner life and loss of spiritual values.’

To describe it as an uphill struggle would be an understatement. Climbing Everest alone and unequipped seems closer to the mark.

They see at least one window through which the light of hope shines (page 237)

[M]any researchers in the field of transpersonal psychology believe that the growing interest in spirituality and the increasing incidence of spontaneous mystical experiences represent an evolutionary trend toward an entirely new level of human consciousness.

As we will see in the final two posts, our medicalisation of schizophrenia and psychosis might well be slowing this process down. If so there is all the more reason to give the Grofs’ case a fair and careful hearing. This will not be easy for the reasons that Fontana has explained.

Incidentally, after acknowledging that absolutely convincing proof of the paranormal seems permanently elusive, after all his years of meticulous investigation Fontana reaches a conclusion very close to that put forward by John Hick (op. cit.: page 327):

Professor William James may have been right when he lamented that it rather looks as if the Almighty has decreed that this area should forever retain its mystery. If this is indeed the case, then I assume it is because the Almighty has decreed that the personal search for meaning and purpose in life and in death are of more value than having meaning and purpose handed down as certainties from others.

In his book The Fifth Dimension, John Hick contends that experiencing the spiritual world in this material one would compel belief whereas God wants us to be free to choose whether to believe or not (pages 37-38):

In terms of the monotheistic traditions first, why should not the personal divine presence be unmistakably evident to us? The answer is that in order for us to exist as autonomous finite persons in God’s presence, God must not be compulsorily evident to us. To make space for human freedom, God must be deus absconditus, the hidden God – hidden and yet so readily found by those who are willing to exist in the divine presence, . . . . . This is why religious awareness does not share the compulsory character of sense awareness. Our physical environment must force itself upon our attention if we are to survive within it. But our supra-natural environment, the fifth dimension of the universe, must not be forced upon our attention if we are to exist within it as free spiritual beings. . . . To be a person is, amongst many other things, to be a (relatively) free agent in relation to those aspects of reality that place us under a moral or spiritual claim.

So what chance do Christina and Stefan Grof stand in their efforts to prove the mystical component of psychosis?

More of that next time.

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